Word: expressions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Managers at American Express must have taken particular delight last month when AT&T Corp. announced that it was selling its Universal credit-card business to Citibank. AT&T's no-annual-fee entry into the credit-card game in 1990 made this industry universally ugly, particularly for Amex. With free Visa and MasterCard bank cards bulging their wallets, consumers were increasingly leaving home without American Express plastic. Instead of paying membership fees for cards that many merchants refused to honor--since American Express took a heavy bite out of purchases--more than 2 million Amex holders cut up their...
...longer. While poor profits have chased AT&T and others from their plastic perches, American Express is soaring. Shoppers today are gladly flashing Amex cards for everything from gasoline to groceries to trips to China. The card was so hot in 1997 that American Express reversed a decade-long slide in its share of the U.S. card market. With a slew of new consumer cards to go with its traditional strength in corporate plastic, American Express raised its share of the $469 billion general purpose card volume in the first half of 1997 from 18.3% to 18.9%--as Visa...
...American Express's turnaround surprised everyone, including H. Spencer Nilson, publisher of the Nilson Report, which tracks spending on credit cards. Nilson is impressed that Amex was able to "come away with any kind of stabilization." He applauds the company for its "significant advances in improving product line and in growth of cardholders and volume. I would not have given them any chance of doing that several years...
...despite the opportunities that Chinese graduate students say are made available to them in the U.S., many express concern with how the increasing popularity of going abroad may affect China...
...film was released, the media has run countless features accompanied by commentaries discussing the state of race relations in this country. It is interesting to note that while these high-falutin' societal spreads have universally praised the movie as an extraordinary achievement, only independent film critics have dared express the truth of the film's artistic mediocrity...